CJ Desai, President of EMC Corp.’s Emerging Technology Division (ETD), and Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks Inc., believe that Hadoop analytics and Isilon storage are a match made in heaven. Desai puts it this way: “The most important thing that customers like is, you don’t have to now create another standalone infrastructure. [They say] ‘I have all this data sitting in Isilon, I know it scales infinitely (meaning very large), and it has all the security features, replication, industry class features’ …. and most importantly, the questions they want to ask out of Hadoop data, they can get it, because they don’t have to worry about infrastructure.”

Although the Apache Hadoop platform is open source, and Bearden affirms that their open-source work is a core part of Hortonworks, he says that their goal is to “bring the ‘enterprise rigor’ to the core platform …. how the security’s dealt with, how the operational functions are dealt with, how the lifecycle and data governance requirements are dealt with, [and] do it in a highly productized, packaged release and QA process that really ensures that [the] platform’s rock solid.” This ensures their systems work at the enterprise level–a necessity in their partnership with Isilon.

The two also had big thoughts about the concept of “data lakes.” Although tech figures like to use the term, that’s not really the way customers think, Desai says. “They told me, CJ, we have lines of business come and say, ‘we can’t wait for a few hours …. we want real time based on mobile responses and all that.’ And that’s how they start the conversation. It’s always the ‘what’s the endgame?’”

Bearden adds that the idea of a data lake is only useful if it allows companies to create value with their systems. “Data lake’s a marketing term. What it really is, is an outline of an architecture, which says we can bring all our data together in a central place. But then, we have to be able to then combine multiple different types of use cases and specific opportunities to go create value from that central data architecture …. We can leverage the power of Isilon to manage that with the power of Hadoop …. to create that reference architecture, and then we, with the power of YARN, can then mix batch, interactive, and real-time use cases simultaneously against that central data lake.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.